NASA Thirolf, Robert - May 24, 1999
Interview with Robert Thirolf
Interviewer: Meredith Summers
Date of Interview: May 24, 1999
Location: Austin, Texas
SUMMERS: Today is May 24, 1999 and I’m talking with Mr. Robert Thirolf for the SWT/NASA project.
SUMMERS: My first question would be background information. You went through that when the tape recorder was off. I’d start out with educational and job-related background.
THIROLF: I graduated from St. Louis U [University] with a BS in EE [Electrical Engineering] in 1950. I worked for McDonnell in their missile division for about five years and I worked for Emerson Electric in their Space and Avionics Division for about five years. Then I worked at McDonnell on the Gemini Program on Gemini 2 as an Emerson employee on loan. Emerson didn’t have that much to do, and McDonnell needed people so we went on loan over there. A group of us worked there for about a year then NASA figured this was too expensive going that route so they told McDonnell they needed to hire us or get their own people in these positions.
So, then, when I went back to Emerson, they still didn’t have enough for us to work on there. When I went back to McDonnell they wanted to send me down to Cape Kennedy [Space Center, Florida] but I knew what it was like there because working on the Gemini 2 for a year I was in contact with a lot of the NASA people from down there. I had five little kids and I [laughter] didn’t want to go to Cape Canaveral with five children. I wound up selling light bulbs for about five weeks I guess and in the mean time I put in an application with NASA while I was working at McDonnell. They came through with an offer down at Houston. I told my wife – they called me on a Saturday afternoon and made an offer – I said if I accept this we’ll probably wind up in Houston. And she said, “What are they going to pay you?” Well, I was willing to take a twenty-five percent cut just to get back in technical work again and they offered me a twenty-five percent raise. So here we are. That was my salvation.
So, I worked at McDonnell in the NASA resident engineering office during the whole Gemini program. At the end of that, after Gemini 12, which was the last one, the Navy formed a space office up there because the way the DOD [Department of Defense] works with these large manufacturers they just have one agency representing the Department of Defense in one facility and at McDonnell it was the Navy. The Navy had pilots there and the whole group to support buying off those airplanes which were F4s or F4Hs at that time. They were going to be given the responsibility. The Air Force ordered a laboratory which McDonnell was going to build. They had no one with any spacecraft experience and there was this nucleus of NASA people that worked on the Gemini program. NASA lent five of us on loan to the Navy to support that [Air Force] program. I guess that lasted for about a year and it never really got off the ground. They finally cancelled the program and we all got transferred down to Houston.
What I got into when I was first down there, they had just set up an engineering office in the medical directorate. Up to that time any medical people doing an experiment – they’d get together with contractors to build them their hardware. There’d be a lot of hand waving and gesturing and stories told about what they wanted, and the manufacturer said yeah well do that. They’d go off and build something, bring it in, shows it, and tell the doctor here’s what you want. They doctor would look at it and say no I can’t use that. They figured they’d better bring in some engineering people and work with specifications and different procedures to organize this thing. Then I was in the nucleus in that group that formed the first engineering group with the medical experiment office down there and that’s where I stayed all the way up to retirement.
There were all kinds of different job titles [laughter] and most of them I didn’t know really what they meant except one where I was identified as a project engineer. We would work with the doctors or physiologist or whoever was doing an experiment and we would make sure that they were following all the quality requirements, all the safety requirements and the timelines and everything else. We would sort of act like an interface between the experimenter and NASA. It was all pretty interesting and all that. I was down there during the Sky Lab program and Apollo and it was just when the shuttle was coming up that I retired in 1981.
SUMMERS: So your job would be to invent the devices that would monitor people’s medical conditions while they were in space?
THIROLF: Yeah, well there was quite a spectrum of experiments. The one I was most closely involved with some of the hardware you see there was SO15. The experimenter was Dr. Phillip Montgomery up in Dallas. He was involved in cell research. At first he was going to do a broad spectrum of analysis on flying human cells to see what they would do. But then we were a couple of years into the program and developing the hardware to do that and some of the other researchers in that same field questioned whether he was going too broad brush in covering too many factors. If he would concentrate on proving the growth rate of cells, if it was affected by zero gravity or not, [that] would be adequate to support the experiment. So we had to go redesign the hardware again. He had a group up in Dallas doing the hardware design and all that and I was just responsible to see that everything was integrated properly down at JSC [Johnson Space Center, Houston] and got on board. There were times when the crew did what they had to do with the experiment in flight.
There were others. There was another one with Fordham University. What he was doing there was time and motion study. We would photograph different activity on the ground, make movies of it, to see how long it took and what the operations were in a one-G environment. We were going to photograph the same types of activities up in space to see if it was easier or more complicated to do certain types of motions and different operations up there. I never did really find out what happened with that one or what the results of it were because by the time the mission was over I didn’t have anything to do with it. It took a year or so to analyze the data and I never did find out what happened. I just lost contact with these people.
SUMMERS: Did you keep up yourself, though, on those kinds of conditions? Do you think it was more difficult to do certain tasks in space? Like the first spacewalk, I heard that was pretty difficult.
THIROLF: I don’t really know. I think the general consensus that it was that it was easier to do these things up in space.
SUMMERS: Do you know of anything – specifically that you worked on – that affected technology today? Something like – let’s say Velcro – something that had an impact on technology.
THIROLF: No, I don’t think I was really involved in something like that.
SUMMERS: Okay
THIROLF: On this single cell experiment there were a lot of other people that were interested in it. I don’t know how far they went with developing it. I know they’re similar type things going on right now. Since that wasn’t my field, per se, I just never got to follow it too closely.
SUMMERS: Do you have any specific stories that you can think of that happened while you were working there that stick out in your mind?
THIROLF: Well, one thing that seems to have fallen down the crack – it’ been a long time ago. But, during the Gemini Program when we were up at McDonnell – two of the astronauts were flying in. I don’t know really what for – but the astronauts were always in and out of St Louis. This was Elliot See and [Charlie] Bassett. They were flying in and it was on a winter morning and I remember coming to work. I was working the dayshift that time and it was a terrible morning. It had wet heavy snow and a dark low ceiling. Actually these two fellows had crashed on top of the engineering building.
Up there I was an operation engineer. I would get together with the McDonnell people and monitor what they were doing for the daily work schedule. It was my responsibility to make sure that they were concentrating on the things that NASA considered to be most important. Throughout the day I would monitor what was going on and as problems would arise – if I felt it was confident to settle what the disagreement was – I would do it myself. Otherwise, if it was in a field that was more foreign to my background – we had specific engineers in that field – in the NASA engineering office. I would get them in to the program and let them resolve the thing.
Right in the conference room, it was on the second floor in this building where these fellows had crashed – it was only a two-story building – and part of the debris came down in the conference room. If they would have crashed an hour later we would have been in there having a conference when parts of this airplane came down through the roof and all that. I was trying to research my literature in the magazines and all the pamphlets I got and they don’t even mention these fellows anymore. I can still see that same morning there and all the trouble and commotion that was going on there.
SUMMERS: When they crashed were they good distance away from the building?
THIROLF: No, they crashed on top of the building.
SUMMERS: So, the plane was actually on top.
THIROLF: Yes, it hit the building coming down.
SUMMERS: I didn’t know if they clipped it and then went off.
THIROLF: No it crashed into the building and part of the debris cascaded off the side and towards the front of the building.
SUMMERS: I read that and I was wondering just the other day what happened to the people inside the building so you answered that for me.
THIROLF: Well, they had to shut down the whole operation for a day but they got it cleaned up and it was back in operation the next day mostly. But, that’s an outstanding thing in my mind.
I guess the other event that stands out in my mind is when we went out to pick up this single cell experiment – it was on Space Lab III. It was picked up by USS New Orleans one of the Navy’s carriers on the Pacific then brought it into the San Diego Naval Air Station. I went out there with Dr. Montgomery and Jim Cook, the engineer from Dallas on that program, and we had to pick up the equipment there out of the spacecraft. We took it directly to Dr. Leonard Haflix's laboratory at Stanford University. He was on of the co-investigators on the program. They did a preliminary analysis of what things looked like there for a day or two before they took it back to Dallas to make a more detailed analysis of what was going on.
It’s a shame; one of the aspects of the cell experiment was taking time lapse photographs of the cell chambers throughout the mission. It was fifty some days I believe. It was on sixteen-millimeter film and I edited a section of it. There should be a copy of it down at NASA. I don’t know if you’d be interested in getting it. I had sent a copy that I had up to my friend in Dallas and he put it on a VCR cassette, but I called him as soon as this came up with you to see if he could send a copy of that and I haven’t gotten it yet. It’s in the literature here. It’s on file down in JSC and that’s pretty interesting. Its file name is S like in sugar dash seventy-three dash two nine zero [S-73-290]. It’s the complete flight film – twenty X and forty X photo micrographs.
SUMMERS: I'll see if they have it at NASA.
THIROLF: But that’s kind of unique. I don’t know what anymore to add or . . .
SUMMERS: I have plenty more questions [laughter].
THIROLF: Okay, go ahead.
SUMMERS: You lived in Clear Lake?
THIROLF: Yes.
SUMMERS: When you came there were there many at lot of people around or were you there when – from my understanding – it was like a pasture.
THIROLF: It was pretty built up by the time we got there. But the one thing that was unique was that practically no one there was from Texas. Everyone was from someplace else and there were no old people there. The church we were going to had many many baptisms – very few funerals [laughter]. It was quite distinct that it was predominately young people from someplace else.
SUMMERS: With many children. I heard that there were always some sort of activity like Splashdown parties or get-togethers. Did you participate?
THIROLF: No, we didn’t get involved in anything like that too much. I think that was mostly in the flight operations people. The people who were more directly involved with the current mission that was going on.
SUMMERS: Okay. Something that I asked and had an answer to was – of course with any kind of project you have to calculate set failures with the project – when Apollo 1 and Gus Grissom and I think it was Young that was killed – how was the workflow for you? Did you feel depressed and did the workflow slow down for you or did you feel more determine to carry on?
THIROLF: Well, that didn’t influence what we were doing so much in the medical experiments office because we were somewhat separated from that. We just more or less continued on the same path and same rate we were working within a mission.
SUMMERS: What were your workdays like? How many hours were you working?
THIROLF: Usually it was just a normal eight-hour day. It was just when unique situations came up. Like if they would be doing a specific test which would run more than eight hours – we’d just stay with that. During the Sky Lab program on this time in motion experiment that I mentioned – for time lapse photography. The Space Lab itself was being built by McDonnell Douglas – I don’t know when it became of McDonnell Douglas but it was McDonnell out in Huntington Beach. I and two of the fellows from Florida that were working for NASA to support this program – we had to go out there to support this test. What we were doing was going into the Space Lab and occupying the same camera positions that they would be doing during flight while the crew went through some of the basic activities so we could make sure we had the right angles. Because what we expected the crew to do on that experiment – they would set up the camera and they had two axes to set the camera on to make sure it was being pointed in the right direction and that’s all they would have to do. They knew when they went to that portion of the Space Lab that we would have them adequately covered by the field of view of the camera. We were going out to verify this in the actual unit out at Huntington Beach. There was just the three of us that had to be there at the time the two Florida fellows and myself, so we had to be there whenever they were running these tests. They were working three shifts so the three of us [clock chiming] so we worked for about thirty hours straight for this test period. That was a little bit more than the normal eight-hour day.
SUMMERS: How many days did this cover?
THIROLF: It was just that one day. Thirty hours straight about. Normally – except when there’d be a mission going on – sometimes if they would be doing some of our things during evening hours we had certain positions in Mission Control where we could go if they had experiment offices away from Mission Control where they were doing actual operations. We had TV monitors and telemetering monitors there where we could monitor some of the things that we were interested in just to back up what was going on. We would come in and put in extra time during those off periods. Normally my activity was just a normal eight our day.
SUMMERS: I heard that a lot of time for people it was twelve hours and more but from what you said you would be able to work eight hours and that would be okay.
THIROLF: Yes, mostly. During the Gemini program back at McDonnell in St. Louis I was an operations engineer there, like I said, we’d monitor what was going on. There were only two of us in that position so one of us would work the normal day shift and one of us would work the evening shift. During the early morning shift the guy that had worked the day shift was supposed to be on call for any problems. If he couldn’t resolve it over the phone he would have to go in to the plant. It turned out that this other operations engineer over a period of time – see it had to be either NASA quality control people that called us or else one of the McDonnell engineers. These people that were responsible for calling to resolve problems they didn’t like talking to this other guy [laughter].
SUMMERS: [laughter]
THIROLF: When I would work the second shift I would just be in bed at one o’clock in the morning and at two o’clock the phone would ring [laughter]. I would say you’re not supposed to call me you’re supposed to call this other guy. “Yeah, but he can never give us the right answer or he won’t come in.” I’d wind up getting called a lot of times when I shouldn’t have been. It was a little extra effort too. It was interesting and there was a lot to do which helped.
SUMMERS: You were saying that your main reason for starting work at NASA because it happened along at the right time for you to put your application in.
THIROLF: Very much so, yes.
SUMMERS: I was wondering if it was more than just at the right time and the pay increase – where there any other reasons for taking the job at NASA?
THIROLF: Well, I was forty-two years old and no one else would even talk to me [laughter] back in St. Louis in my field. I was too old or had too much experience. Like I said, I had these five kids to take care of and we’re in a new house for about a year and a half. I was desperate for a job. But it was the best thing that ever happened to me.
One other highlight – when they would finish the construction on one of the Gemini models – they would run three tests. One would be an all systems test, which would run either a week or two weeks depending on if they encountered any difficult problems. Then after that they would go right into simulated flight, which the crew and the back-up crew always came up to St. Louis for these tests. They would participate in them as crewmembers. For the simulated flight they would actually get suited up and get in the cockpit or in the cabin and go through the whole routine of simulated lift off, re-entry, and the whole business. The last test would be an altitude chamber tests where they would get suited up, get inside, and close they hatches. They had this tremendous vacuum chamber that they could put the whole capsule in there and evacuate it down to as close as they can get to zero PSI [pressure per square inch]. At some point the EVA [extra vehicle activity] they would actually open it up in that evacuated condition, get out, and just walk around on the platform and get back in again.
At the end at all three of these tests which would usually run about a month – when it was all finished and all the problems were signed off – usually one of the McDonnell manger types would have a little house party at his house for the crew and the NASA support people that were in on this. At this one [house party] my wife and I both got to talk to Jim Lovell for about twenty minutes. He’s a really neat ordinary guy. He’s about my age and he had kids the same age we did. We talked about his kids and he talked about ours. It was real great that we had an opportunity to meet him there too then. That was before he became real famous [laughter].
SUMMERS: I heard that Jim Lovell was described as someone who was very sane for the amount of risks that he took in his career. He is a very nice man.
THIROLF: Most of the astronauts that we met up there were pretty neat guys. It was a lot of fun meeting them and working with them up there.
SUMMERS: You’d have a lot of contact with them when they came up to St. Louis?
THIROLF: We did during the Gemini program because we were just a small group and we were all together there. The only ones I had contact with down in NASA were those that were medically oriented and I have pictures that Story Musgrave and Karl Henize and Dr. Rhea Seddon signed when I left NASA. I asked if they could give me an autographed picture, which they did. My problem now is that all these people have retired too and they’re all gone and off doing other things. It was great working with them.
SUMMERS: You’re saying over all that your work experience at NASA was positive?
THIROLF: Oh, very very much so, yes.
SUMMERS: Did you ever feel that you were a part of something that would make history – something that would fundamentally change . . .?
THIROLF: I guess I never thought of it in that light but it was just interesting, really fun to work at, and enjoyable.
SUMMERS: After you left NASA what did you do? Did you go immediately into retirement?
THIROLF: I just flat out retired and my wife and I just go to the stores. We did travel a little bit when I first retired but I’ve come up with physical problems. I had prostate cancer four years ago and I had that operated on and things that can go bad with that operation went bad with me. That’s a restraint on traveling. I got Parkinson’s Disease just like Janet Reno now. It’s somewhat of an impediment in driving. I get fatigued when I just drive for about half an hour. We’re just hanging in there – you just got here in time [laughter].
SUMMERS: No [laughter]. We’re going to take a break and then we’ll go into the second half of it. These are the questions that NASA had on their own agenda for me to ask you. I think we covered just about everything they wanted. We can take a break.
THIROLF: [unintelligible] the Sky Lab, Apollo and now the Spacelab. At the party – it was one of the fellows’ house at Nassau Bay after work one night – and all the people that were there signed it. They had this all made up ready to go except for the frame. I had it framed afterwards. I have this recollection of these people that were there. This is my most prized thing.
JOAN KREBS THIROLF: You had asked if the community was all built up. I wouldn’t say the community was all built up but it wasn’t by any means a pasture. For instance there were cows that would walk right along the rail road track near Highway 3.
THIROLF: We lived right off of Highway 3.
JOAN THIROLF: They would walk up to El Dorado and in the evening they would come back.
SUMMERS: [laughter]
CHRISTOPHER ELLEY: Literally when the cows come home.
THIROLF: They gave me this one when I retired too from John Young and Bob Griffin.
SUMMERS: And that’s the first space shuttle?
THIROLF: That’s the first space shuttle that flew.
SUMMERS: Have your job title or your job descriptions stayed the same throughout your career at NASA or did it change any?
THIROLF: Well, the biggest change was going from an operations engineer during the Gemini program down to a project engineer in a medical directorate.
SUMMERS: [unintelligible]
ELLEY: [unintelligible]
SUMMERS: He’s going to set you up.
THIROLF: This is Karl Henize [referring to an autograph picture]. My older boy went to high school with him so we had a connection that way with him. He died on a Mt. Everest expedition. He was taking some kind of radiation experiment up there. That all happened after I retired so I don’t really know exactly why he was there and exactly what he was doing except he was carrying up a radiation experiment. He had a heart attack and he actually was buried over there.
SUMMERS: Wow!
THIROLF: He, Dr. Rhea Seddon, and Story Musgrave were my principle contacts in the astronaut office. Whenever we would need an astronaut’s opinion on something I would see one of these three. Bill [Joe] Kerwin, I worked with him quite a bit. He was another M.D. that was in the astronaut office.
SUMMERS: What kind of questions would they have for you or what kind of concerns? Do you remember anything specifically?
THIROLF: Well, it was usually me asking them questions. Last thing I was working on with them was we were trying to develop a centrifuge for spinning blood specimens to separating the blood cells. We’d come up with a certain design concept or a certain operational mode and I would talk to them about their opinion – if they thought we were going in the right direction or if they had any recommendations. When we would get hardware in for a test we would invite them to participate in it, to check it out or just to come see – look at the equipment.
SUMMERS: for the centrifuge would it separate the white from the red blood cells?
THIROLF: Right.
SUMMERS: Were they experimenting with that in space?
THIROLF: Yes, a lot of the experimenters needed that type of equipment for things they do in their laboratories down here for long duration missions. They wanted to separate the plasma, the white cells and all that. I didn’t know what they did with it. My only interest was making something that would spin and not fly out or come out when it stopped.
SUMMERS: Okay.
THIROLF: That was still in development phase when I left. I’m sure they have something because just recently on one of the recent missions I read something where they mentioned something about a centrifuge. So I guess they got something.
SUMMERS: [unintelligible, talking to Elley]
ELLEY: [unintelligible]
SUMMERS: It sounds like you had your group of people that had their on work pace. I guess more task oriented with what you were doing? There was a deadline set to get a man on the moon by the end of the decade – did you feel driven like the other people that were working there?
THIROLF: No, I don’t really think so because nothing that we were working on or responsible for had any impact as such on whether they did go or when they went or however. Ours was more or less ancillary activity – when they went this is what they would do. We were more or less paced on what the program was doing. We had no constraints on speeding it up or any impediments on slowing it down.
SUMMERS: Just for your opinion – they driving force behind the space program – what do you think that was? Why do you think we set a goal to go to the moon?
THIROLF: I think the Russians were the greatest motivation we had. It seems like we were always reacting to whatever they were doing. I guess unfortunately they’ve fallen on hard times and all of that.
SUMMERS: Did you think after we reached the moon what would happen next? What would be the next stage?
THIROLF: Yes, I was just hoping that if they found a diamond like the size of a basketball or something and brought that back.
SUMMERS: [laughter]
THIROLF: . . . there would be a little more public support.
SUMMERS: There’s a difference of how the public felt about NASA when the space missions where going on. What do you think these differences were and what affects that?
THIROLF: I was always critical of NASA from a public relations standpoint. I don’t think anybody could have used better PR than NASA. I didn’t feel comfortable with what was coming out. Even where I am now there’s things I’d like to know and be able to follow what’s going on. Just what I see in the media isn’t informative at all.
SUMMERS: You don’t think there’s enough time spent?
THIROLF: I don’t know if it’s a time element or if it’s the material they’re covering or what NASA is offering.
SUMMERS: If you were PR for NASA how would you go about . . .?
THIROLF: Well, I don’t know – that’s strictly foreign to my background and all that. All that I know is that I’m curious as to what they’re doing and I don’t have the faintest idea of what’s going on up there. I would think that with my background if there was more information available to the general public, I would know more what’s going on. It seems like they launch an orbiter and goes up and does something and comes down again. So what, I mean, up and down, up and down. But what’s really going on and what are they really doing? Now it might be my problem that I’m not subjected to journals where some of this is being reflected.
SUMMERS: I think you’re right because the public normally doesn’t pick up a journal. They usually read newspapers or see it on the TV. Like you said it doesn’t seem to be reflected in the media – not enough attention or coverage.
THIROLF: I would think so, yes.
SUMMERS: Where do you think the institution is going in the future? What do you see happening?
THIROLF: Well, I have great reservations about this space station because… I mean, just today I was reading where they have having problems with the segment that the Russians built. It’s so noisy that they’re going to have to wear earplugs up there just to exist in there. The part that the United States put up there – it’s having some sort of communications problem. To me it’s such an extensive thing that the utter complexity of the whole thing. I have great reservations if it would ever be a success. With the Russians in the position they’re in now – with the lack of funding and all that – it looks like we’re paying for the whole darn thing. We’re not really having control of what’s really going on.
SUMMERS: That was my second question. Do you think working with another country would be more beneficial because of the economic problems that Russia is having?
THIROLF: I’m sure that people working the program in Russia are probably doing the best they can with their limited resources and all that. I think the utter complexity of the whole thing – of putting it together up there and expecting it to work over a sustained period. Just judging by problems we’ve had on the ground where we can actually get our hands on the stuff and get it in pretty good shape before it was launched. I mean I’ve got pictures of the Gemini spacecraft here and to me it’s a minor miracle that we ever got those going up and down considering how complex they were.
SUMMERS: Considering how fast technology has advanced in the last thirty years.
THIROLF: I think we’ve made a lot of improvements in electronics, solid state circuitry and computers. Like I said, this time and motion experiment that we ran – we had to use the best smallest sixteen-millimeter cameras that were available at that time. Even so they were things like that. And it took sixteen-millimeter film, which is fairly large stuff. Now you can get TV cameras that are about that big [making a gesture showing how small the cameras are today]. We’ve could have gone great guns if we had that equipment available to us. The timers in this SO15 – the cell experiment for cell growth – the timers we used there were conventional watches except rather than moving hands they just rotated a drum with contacts on. We had fits with that because they had to go so slow that I did a little math to figure out what the closure rates of the contacts were. When the contact would come up on this drum. It was something like micro-inches per second. I’ve got [unintelligible] pictures. We had trouble when it was making contact – when the signal would actually say okay it’s closed and when it’s open. We had fits with those things. Fortunately, it didn’t cause any problems in the experiment, but if we had some little solid state timers as nowadays we wouldn’t have any of the problems like we had with that. Things have changed so fast.
SUMMERS: With the success of NASA it depends on public interest and how much money the government willing to spend on NASA projects because they are so expensive that they have to be funded.
THIROLF: Yes, I would think so but like I say – I think they have to do a better job of selling than what they are doing now. I mean I don’t know what they are doing now much less being in a position to say yes that’s good or no that isn’t.
SUMMERS: Do you think they are being secret about it or do you think they don’t think about telling the public?
THIROLF: No I think they are so close to it that they don’t have the right perspective to see what somebody from the outside would need to know or what they would have to be presented with in order to realize what's going on.
SUMMERS: I’m awfully curious about [gesturing towards the pictures on the coffee table].
THIROLF: Oh, this is some of the documentation that exists on the program that I was most intimately involved with during my whole career. Many times I was more or less just off to the side doing what somebody else wanted to do. This is the technical report that the experimenter made, Dr. D.O.B. Montgomery. That’s his report on the science of what happened and I don’t understand any of it [looking through the report]. Do you need to copy any of this down?
SUMMERS: [unintelligible]
THIROLF: This is from a technical journal. This is probably an issue from it.
SUMMERS: It’s a shame that you didn’t hear about the final results.
THIROLF: I know about this but I didn’t know about the time in motion experiment because this was pretty close to when I was still working there and still made contact with these people. I still make contact with these people. Last that I heard Dr. Montgomery is still alive. Now this engineer – he’s on the net – I email him every once in a while and talk to him on the phone. Like I said this is a summary of the scientific results of the experiment. I wrote this [picking up another document from the coffee table]. It’s a technical memo. It’s NASA accession notice M like in man seventy-six dash eleven four oh seven [M76-11407]. The number of the technical note is JSC09728NASATMX-58164 – September ’75. What I did here this explains the characteristics of how we developed the hardware and what it really did from an engineering standpoint. There’s some pictures giving you an idea what these [unintelligible] are [flipping the pages of the report]. This is what the experiment package looked like. It was a box about so big [approximately three inches by two inches] and then they went in the command module in this compartment here and it was more or less just [unintelligible] it connected up to the power source. The crew just had to come and look at it every once in awhile, there were indicator lights when different functions would be working, just to make sure these lights were flickering. [very loud chiming of clock which drowned out the interviewee’s voice]. So there was very little human interface.
One part of the experiments – like I said they have this sixteen-millimeter film down in JSC – one part of the experiment was to do time lapse photography of the cells. Now here’s the cell chambers [pointing at drawing in the technical report] there were two, one here and one down here. These were nutrient tubes. You had to keep the cells at a certain temperature, you had to give them so much nutrients and flush them out every once in a while. That was one part of the experiment. The other part was the cell growth experiment. They had these little cell chambers – now this is the mechanical structure – and this had two cover glasses with a space in between [showing a drawing from a technical report]. They had these little holes where they had to feed the nutrients and flush it out. In fact, there was a stack of these along here and then these were the nutrient chambers to feed these things. These monitored what the cell growth rate was, and I think the determination there is that zero gravity didn’t seem to make any difference. They grew at the same rate up there as they do at one G. This was the initial design configuration where they were going to do all these things and investigate a lot of aspects of cell activity. Some of the other investigators – the scientists in that field – questioned that it was a too extensive a survey.
We redesigned this whole section here to be in this section here. What this is – this part here [showing the small metal box with chambers inside and holes bored through the box] – these were the cell chambers on this unit and this is where they had the nutrients [pointing to the holes that went all the way through the box like tunnels]. Now the reason I kept that [referring to the metal box with chambers] – I guess you have to be an engineer or machinist to realize the fine piece of workmanship on here. You can drill little tiny holes all the way through this block from one side to the other and still come out right in between these little thin walls here [referring to the chambers in the box]. The drill wouldn’t work off or so. I’m fascinated by that.
SUMMERS: Was the drill specially invented for this project?
THIROLF: No, I don’t think so. They just used conventional machinist techniques.
SUMMERS: That’s pretty good.
THIROLF: And the only reason for this is that somebody proposed that this unit was closed and sealed up in Dallas where this investigative laboratory was. And it was hermetically sealed. Obviously if they took it down to Cape Kennedy at sea level and opened it up there would be a pressure differences there and some stuff might squirt out. So they wanted a provision to relieve the pressure on this thing before they ever opened it up if they would change positions. They asked how they would do that. These fellows up in Dallas – they were that precise – there would be no mistake that they could do it and what they were going to do. They made this thing up – this is a simulation of the front edge of the container and what they did – they just drilled all the way through it – and put this little tiny plug in there. So before you would ever open it up – you just took this little spanner wrench, took the plug out, and that would relieve the pressure. They went through this much trouble just to show the people down at JSC how they would do it.
You were talking about the paper world – this is the basic document that accommodated every experiment. There was an experiment requirements document. This was for the affects of zero gravity on single human cells. Would you want this record number?
SUMMERS: Yes.
THIROLF: It’s MSC-KW-D-69-20 Provision C. [Unintelligible]. All these things are all regimented and formatted and all you have to do is follow down the line and try to comply with everything there. This was approved by Dr. Montgomery, the principal investigator, but Jim Cook, his engineer, signed off on it. George Armstrong – he was the chief of the Biomedical Technology Division of JSC. Oh, this is MSC that was still Manned Space Center [Houston] then. And Roger Major – he was the project office program manager. A guy named Rafael – he was down at KFC [Kennedy Spaceflight Center, Florida] – he had to approve it too. And then these were all key personnel that were involved. Jim Crumb, he was in the program office, Dr. Montgomery, the investigator, Dr. Joseph Paul, he was one of the assistants of Dr. Montgomery, and Dr. Leonard Hethcliff, he was the guy at Stanford who provided the cells, Jim Cook, he was the chief engineer, and myself, I was the representative of the life science director.
This is a formatted document and every experiment had to comply with this as much as possible. [Reading from the experiment requirement document] I mean objectives, concepts, description and function, data requirements, flight vehicle systems requirements, width, volume, dimension, sketches, stowed requirements, operational requirements, post-operational requirements, alignment, orientation, television requirements, interface schematic, interface identification, experiment [unintelligible] requirements, target description, flight crew operations requirements, flight operation requirements, post acceptance testing, resupply and activation requirements. We had to go through and fill this thing out as much as was applicable. Some places weren’t applicable. It’s the format which enabled them to do what they did with the complex stuff they were building.
Let me see if I kind find this other thing. Here’s the whole ball of wax. Could you hold this [referring to document]? This is an Apollo application program experiment configuration management control diagram. It starts right here with “begin with the hardware development effort.” You had to have a NASA approved flight hardware end item specifications – you start out with that. All the documents and all the tests you had to go all the way through [following the list]: preliminary design review, critical design review, acceptance test review, and then you finally wind up with the mission down here. You have to go and meet all these requirements. It’s all delineated what you have to do. That’s what I had to do was make sure that these experiments met all these criteria for documents, tests, and approvals.
SUMMERS: Pretty lengthy.
THIROLF: But everybody does this.
SUMMERS: You have to be very precise about the end results before you can send someone up there [referring to space travel].
THIROLF: I did have some foreign contacts too. I got this from some doctor in Germany. I’d given a paper on SO15 out at [unintelligible] California – some medical group out there. I don’t know how this guy found out about it but he wanted to know if I had published a paper on it. He had sent me this card and I just said that I didn’t but I referred him back to this documentation here. Some of the things I worked on did get some foreign coverage.
SUMMERS: What was his interest?
THIROLF: I don’t really know. All he did was send me this card and it’s in German, English, and French. It said, “I would be very pleased to receive a reprint of your paper – Sky Lab experiment SO15 effects of zero gravity on human cells [unintelligible]. Thanking you in advance for your kindness. Sincerely Yours Dr. W. Admir. He’s from Munich, West Germany. I just sent him this and sent him the documentation and I didn’t hear from him anymore.
This fellow, Gus [last name], he was over in Zurich Switzerland – he was doing something that was going to utilize the same type of hardware. I had to support him and I talked to him a couple times over there. He came over to the states a couple of times to talk to me. The last I heard from him was that they were going to be delayed because of military priorities – whatever that would be. He said, “we will meet in June in Paris to discuss the situation.” He was a real neat guy. The last time I saw him he was on his way out to Colorado to do some mountain climbing with a friend of his and he wanted to buy some climbing boots. We went over to the mall down in Clear Lake. He wanted a specific pair type of boot and he found what he wanted in one of the shoe stores. All he had was an American Express card and they wouldn’t accept it. He was heartbroken so I got it for him on my Discover card. He was real appreciative of that.
SUMMERS: [unintelligible]
THIROLF: Do you want to see some pictures?
SUMMERS: Yes.
ELLEY: I don’t have much tape left so I’m going to hold the tape and if you have any pictures of you at the time you were at NASA I'd love to shoot those on the remaining portion of my tape. Y’all can still keep talking.
SUMMERS: Okay.
THIROLF: No, I really don’t have any pictures like that.
ELLEY: Maybe I’ll just take a look at those if you don’t have anything.
SUMMERS: I guess my remaining question that I have for you before I run out of tape myself is that if our positions were reversed and you were interviewing me and I had worked at NASA what are some questions that you would have.
THIROLF: Well, you caught me.
SUMMERS: I’ll let my tape run.
THIROLF: This is the Sky Lab [referring to a picture].
SUMMERS: It’s more roomy than the rest of the missions.
THIROLF: Yes.
SUMMERS: Is this the Saturn V rocket?
THIROLF: Yes. It’s possible that some of these pictures didn’t appear in normal media outlets through magazines.
SUMMERS: I’m not sure about this [referring to a picture of tracks on the lunar surface].
THIROLF: That’s the tracks of the Rover [a picture of the lunar vehicle tracks].
SUMMERS: All of these are great pictures of the moon.
THIROLF: I don’t think they inspire me to want to go to the moon?
SUMMERS: You wouldn’t go if you had the chance?
THIROLF: I don’t think so.
SUMMERS: Would you do any kind of space travel at all if you had the chance?
THIROLF: Probably not.
SUMMERS: Your reason why? I’m just curious. I have my reasons.
THIROLF: Oh, I don’t know. I guess being seventy-seven I have a distorted outlook. I’m surprised I’ve been here this long [laughter].
SUMMERS: [laughter]
SUMMERS: [unintelligible]